Joker's Full Face Revealed In The Batman's 5-Minute Deleted Scene

A five-minute-long deleted scene of Barry Keoghan as Joker from the latest The Batman film has been released. Matt Reeves, director of The Batman later released a 4k version as well on Vimeo. Keoghan is only heard (and half-seen) briefly in the film's final moments but we get to see a little more of the iconic character in the deleted scene where Bruce Wayne/Batman (Robert Pattinson) discusses the Edward Nashton/Riddler (Paul Dano) case with the Joker.

In this scene, Batman meets his arch-nemesis for insight into the identity of the mysterious Riddler, a serial killer targeting Gotham's elite. "I think somewhere deep down you're just terrified," the Joker taunts Batman, "because you're not sure he's wrong." 

"It's not an Easter egg scene," Reeves explained to Variety. "It's not one of those end credits Marvel or DC scenes where it's going, like, 'Hey, here's the next movie!' In fact, I have no idea when or if we would return to that character in the movies. I thought it'd be really neat if so much of the fabric of Gotham just already existed...I never was trying to say like, 'Hey, guess what, here's the Joker. Next movie!'" he added. "The idea was more to say, 'Hey, look, if you think that trouble is going to go away in Gotham, you can forget it. It's already here. And it's already delicious.'"

Although his appearance is never fully revealed, the villain is mostly out of focus or obscured by camera angles. Some angles give a clearer look to his face full of scars. Reeves' re-imagined Joker was designed by Keoghan and makeup artist Michael Marino and the inspiration for his "Joker who's not yet the Joker" included a homage to the mutilated mouth of Conrad Veidt's Gwynplaine in The Man Who Laughs, the 1928 silent film that influenced the DC Comics character. 

"He's held in this very suspenseful way, away from you visually. But I wanted to create an iteration of him that felt distinctive and new, but went right back to the roots," Reeves previously told IGN. "So he's very much out of the Conrad Veidt mold and that idea of the silent film of The Man Who Laughs. He can never stop smiling. And it made Mike [Marino] and I think about—I was talking about The Elephant Man because I love David Lynch. And I was like, 'Well, maybe there's something here where it's not something where he fell in a vat of chemicals or it's not the [Christopher] Nolan thing where he has these scars and we don't know where they came from,'" Reeves explained. "What if this is something that he's been touched by from birth and that he has a congenital disease that refuses to let him stop smiling? And he's had this very dark reaction to it, and he's had to spend a life of people looking at him in a certain way and he knows how to get into your head.'"